Nobusuke Kishi

Nobusuke Kishi (13 November 1896-7 August 1987) was Prime Minister of Japan from 31 January 1957 to 19 July 1960, succeeding Tanzan Ishibashi and preceding Hayato Ikeda. Before becoming Prime Minister, Kishi was a World War II war criminal, having brutally ruled over the puppet state of Manchukuo during the war. After the war, the United States released him due to his pro-American and conservative views. He was a member of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, initiating the "1955 System", during which the LDP was the overwhelmingly dominant party in Japan. Kishi was the brother of Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and the maternal grandfather of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Biography
Nobusuke Kishi was born in Tabuse, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan in 1896, the older brother of future Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University before entering the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in 1920. Kishi supported Ikki Kita's fascist policies, and he was shocked and impressed with the first of the Soviet Union's five-year plans after visiting the USSR in 1929. Kishi became a supporter of state-sponsored industrial development, and he became a member of the "reform bureaucrats"; from 1933 onwards, he attacked democracy in his speeches and stated that Nazi Germany should be a model for Japan.

In 1935, Kishi was appointed Deputy Minister of Industrial Development of Manchukuo, and he carried out a policy of forced industrialization with a reckless disregard for human life. The Kwantung Army, which was also distrustful of capitalism, gave Kishi complete control of Manchukuo's economy, and he was given the authority to spur on industrial growth by any means necessary. He introduced a five-year plan for Manchukuo, and he spent almost all of his time in Manchukuo's capital of Hsinking (Changchun), apart from taking the Asian Express to Dalian in alcohol and sex-drenched weekends. Kishi would use Yakuza thugs to ensure that the Chinese workers never went on strike despite long hours, low pay, and poor working conditions. In 1937, he signed a decree calling for the use of slave labor to be conscripted in both Manchukuo and northern China. At the Fushun coal mine, the mine always had 40,000 workers, 25,000 of which had to be replaced every year, as their predecessors had died due to poor working conditions and low living standards. The brutal Kishi had nothing but contempt for the Chinese, whom he called "robot slaves", and he returned to Japan in 1939.

In 1940, he became a minister of Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe's government, and Hideki Tojo appointed him Minister of Munitions in October 1941. In 1942, he was elected to the lower house of the National Diet, and he was held at Sugamo Prison as a "Class A war criminal" after World War II's end in 1945. Kishi, who had been used to having sex with dozens of women every day, found his solitude and celibacy hard to cope with. In 1948, he was released, having never been indicted or tried for war crimes. In 1952, the prohibition on former government members was rescinded, allowing for Kishi to return to politics.

Kishi became a member of the new Japan Democratic Party and the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, and the United States believed that he could lead postwar Japan in a pro-US direction. He went on to consolidate the Japanese conservative camp against perceived threats from the Japan Socialist Party in the 1950s, and he became Prime Minister in 1957 as an LDP member. He oversaw Japan's entry into the United Nations Security Council, the payment of reparations to Indonesia, the signing of a commercial treaty with Australia, and the signing of peace treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia. He struggled to recruit Asian nations into the Asian Development Fund (ADF), with many Asian politicians expressing their disgust at returning to Japanese influence; the leader of Burma, the former Japanese collaborator U Nu, was afraid that his people would remember the days when he shouted pan-Asian slogans in support of fascist Japan. Kishi also fostered a climate of opinion when anyone who criticized his government was seen as a traitor, and the police did nothing to stop the far-right from intimidating or assassinating Kishi's critics. In 1960, he resigned due to fearing that a revolution of university students would occur in Japan, just as in South Korea that same year.